Swimming in the Volcano

by Bob Shacochis

  He believed he knew Iman Ibrahim, but he did not yet understand Cassius Collymore. Which was exactly his motive for sending him—them—to Cotton Island.

  Mek some new friend, eh? Some gy-url friend. You see?

  Sah.

  Also. Marcus still movin ganj, eh?

  Ibrahim shrugged, not knowing.

  Mek him stop, nuh?

  Cool.

  Daht fella exploit de masses, nuh?

  Sah.

  I am authorizin you to mek him stop as you see fit, nuh?

  Sah.

  He explained further about how the corporal should approach the woman, then dismissed him, and, remembering another angle of pursuit, wrote something on a piece of paper, a reminder to himself to send his own cable, not to Miami, where the first one had originated, but to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City.

  He sat meditating upon his pursuit of Kingsley, and through Kingsley, the colossus to the North, from which he could not be deterred, until the phone rang. It was Eddy’s secretary, informing him the prime minister wished for five minutes of his time, within the hour. Government House was only three blocks west but not since he had been promoted to this office had he taken that walk, like a street patrolman. He called in his own secretary and told her to order ready his car and driver.

  In the prime minister’s office, Edison Banks greeted Walker with courtesy. He stood up from his paperwork to shake the lieutenant commander’s hand, then came out from behind his ornate desk and invited Walker to sit with him on the sofa. Before he spoke again, he poured them both glasses of ice water, his brow furrowed as he concentrated on what he was doing. The meeting was brief. The glasses stayed where the prime minister had poured them, on the coffee table, untouched.

  “Lloyd stop by,” said Banks. “He told me Archie get off okay.”

  Selwyn Walker nodded. “Good, good,” he said.

  “You movin too fast, Selwyn.”

  He kept his resolve, though he had not expected to be confronted about this. “Prime Minister Banks, I ask permission to request military advisors.”

  “What! You jokin, mahn,” the prime minister scoffed. “From who?”

  “Cuba. Sah.”

  “You fellas worryin me, you know, Selwyn.” Edison Banks sighed, and absently rubbed an ear, looking out the window. Ever since pre-coalition days, he had authorized low-level contacts between the PEP and the Cuban government, but he didn’t want to make a lot of noise about it. Since then, he had let Walker discreetly pursue an advanced training program for some of his police units on Cuban soil, but he was leery of allowing the relationship with the Cubans to warm up beyond that, not until it was clear if this policy shift toward Havana in Washington would prove productive. It would be unwise, it wouldn’t make sense, to antagonize these people at such a portentous moment, and besides, he had never been keen on the idea of anybody’s military to come advise them. Getting them to come was always easy; getting them to go home was like trying to separate two dogs jooking. He had accepted an invitation from Fidel Castro to attend a national celebration in Havana in July. At that time, he told Selwyn Walker, he would raise this issue with the Cuban head of state. The lieutenant commander was not in agreement with the prime minister, and said so.

  “You moving too fast, Selwyn. Is it so bad?”

  “It will be, Eddy.”

  “No,” said Edison Banks, “I don’t believe so, Selwyn. We should save this for the next executive meeting of the party, eh?”

  The prime minister checked his watch and regarded Walker with powerful—sudden and startling—aggravation. Selwyn stood, saluted, and walked himself to the door, leaving Edison Banks on the sofa, staring out the window.

  Back in his own office, Selwyn Walker waited impatiently while the operator tried to connect him with Mexico.

  Government Information Service. St. Catherine. W.I.

  PRESS RELEASE: For immediate use.

  RADIO: Radio 805 (Please announce three days consecutively)

  *******************************************************

  Authorities at National Police Headquarters in Queenstown reported that during the week past, two NPF rural stations in the North Leeward districts of Balmont and Cri de Coeur were the target of attacks by a band or bands of unidentified men. Private Albion Lewis, of the Mansard Station, suffered a cutlass slash to his right forearm. The brigands are reported to have made off with rifles and ammunition. It is unknown at this time whether the attacks are related. A sergeant on the scene however said that the suspects appeared to him to have conducted themselves in a disciplined fashion. The sergeant declined to speculate as to whether the men had received military training, or whom they might represent. Authorities at NPPHQ consider the incidents serious and promise a proper and thorough investigation of the matter.

  *******************************************************

  Ministry of Information Bulletin D24-77. Initialed and available for distribution: Hon. Min. LP Fri. p.m. 1 Apr.

  Chapter 20

  By the time Mitchell arrived back in Howard Bay it was dark, much too dark—a darkness dredged up from another epoch; a thick, nerve-wracking, unyielding blackness. All the way along the coast, from the hill lowering into Augustine out to Pilo Bight, the electricity was off, though inland, up through the steep valleys, occasionally he saw a mountainside sparkled with power. Along the highway, houses were shuttered, lifeless. Sometimes back in the bush a rag-soaked torch slapped a greasy light high up into the branches of trees. In the taxi’s sweep of headlights, people walking the road looked angry or dum-founded, like startled animals, ready to defend themselves or run.

  His mouth tingled with curry from the dinner he had eaten alone in town. He read Johnnie’s note by candlelight. Her absence purified the house again, he thought at first, but then gradually another presence, like an aura or after-image, pressed against his sense of well-being, as if within these walls something fateful had occurred—an accident, a death—and had been cleaned up but not erased. His head began to pound and he patted his way blindly through the house to the bathroom, swallowing what he hoped were four aspirin. Then—he was certain he could hear its hum, entering the silence—the electricity came back and he went into every room, turning on the lights.

  He picked away at Johnnie like a scab, vacillating between relief and disbelief. Her very arbitrariness made it impossible to discern what use she might have for him and, frankly, he was getting sick and tired of reflecting upon Johnnie’s motives. Like the simplest of fools, he forgave her, too, but being happy about it was like asking him to draw on some inner resources that he did not have. He doubted himself profoundly, that despite all his wounded rhetoric and posturing, he hadn’t the stomach to say, That’s enough, I’m cutting losses on you, you’re beyond redemption, I’m beyond tolerance, and nothing’s more inexcusable at this point than hope, not even love. Love didn’t require it, love could prosper just as it was, without a future, could be mad, irresponsible and self-generating or self-destructive, as it wanted, a mad molecule that could not be contained, or held accountable, but a relationship was a different matter and had no business existing, an economist might say, without a sense or vision of profit.

  She was some sort of international outlaw, for the love of Christ. How fatuous, utterly ridiculous, and unthinkable. How did she let this happen? Selling dime bags of grass to her friends!? I mean, really, Mitchell cursed to himself, livid, throwing open kitchen windows, banging ice from the tray in the refrigerator to fix himself a rum and tonic. Stupid, stupid, she was completely worthless, this bitch. He took his drink out onto the veranda to stare savagely over the black, soothing water, until it found a place for his outrage.

  This time, it had taken Johnnie only three days to cast his life in murk and shit, and here was a government minister, a man he answered to—and who knows what other interested parties, certainly—right in the middle, telling him to measure his distance from this woman in miles, oceans, continents. And that ran
kled him; he recoiled from that too. A pronouncement. What concern of it was Kingsley’s—Kingsley was a crook himself! Fuck Kingsley. Fuck all. The principle of sanctuary still held, could not be revoked by pronouncements.

  In its phrasing and scrawl, her note communicated breathless speed, a frantic slippage of control: Mitch! Mitch! Please come down, join us, be with me, in our own world, I love you, Believe! I want, believe how much I want, you. Now, then, always. I’m going because you want me to go. I’m giving you time to think. Sally says you’ll come tomorrow. I’m doing this for you.

  She’s doing this for me, he mocked; what was he, the no-longer-elusive project of her life, the subject of her aimless energy, her anxious smoking, her Tinkerbell blasts of cocaine? She was a selfish, corrosive woman—what had she ever done that connected her to forces greater than herself? What actually was the point of her life, he’d like to know. What actually did she identify with, besides pleasure?

  The canvas of a sail snapped, luffing, somewhere out in the bay; Mitchell peered into the shimmering darkness as if it had called his name. The pinprick red and green running lights of an invisible boat maneuvered toward the cut into the harbor, difficult enough to navigate in daylight. Uncharacteristically, he felt excluded from the lives that surrounded him, lives that perhaps offered more, and then the irrational fear came over him—She’s abandoned me, again.

  It was driving him mad, thinking about sex with Johnnie. He stood away from the rail, detaching himself from the madness, and went into the kitchen to make himself another drink, more rum this time, less tonic, and came back outside.

  If he went down to Cotton, what would it mean? or rather, he corrected himself, what wouldn’t it mean?

  He could go down too—what prevented him? The reefs and beaches were paradisiacal, the pace stuporous, the people happy and unbothered by the aristo invasion that threatened to unhouse them within the span of a generation. Saconi was there, and Isaac, in all probability. An impromptu tribe of celebrities would be lying about in the sugary sand, basking in heroic self-regard, ducking in and out of their hideaways. (What did Mick Jagger have in mind for us at the London School of Economics anyway? Mitchell wondered.) He would take Johnnie diving into the celestial waters and they would emerge from the ocean cleansed, their minds clear and their bodies young and perfect.

  Sleep atop the sheets, he thought. Her skin. She did owe him this—a moment, a time and place to reconsider. You never knew if it would be meaningless until you got there.

  The decision wasn’t so terrible to make, after all. He would take the morning ferry.

  Maybe, he thought after a while, it would be realistic to accept that Johnnie has to go, under the circumstances. Yet, under the circumstances, if he had any sense, he would be the one to leave, leave the islands altogether, and she could stay or go as she pleased, depending on her ability to manipulate Immigration. He was beginning to loathe the farce of his employment, the wasted breath, the waste, the ephemeral designs of progress, the riddles and convoluting duplicities, the conflicting voices, the oil and water of ideologies, the disguises that peel away upon still more disguises. Toward the plight of St. Catherine he had grown a shade unsympathetic, wary of his best colleagues and hateful toward the power brokers, the ministers and sub-ministers, who conspired in an increasingly bad and tasteless lampoon called Leadership. And it was painful to watch men he admired, men like Edison Banks, thwarted every step of the way on the road to change and reform. Banks was a moralist, he had waged a bloodless campaign against despotism and corruption, he was committed to decency and in that respect, he, Mitchell Wilson, was the same. All he had ever intended was to act decently, in his profession, in his private life, and now look at him. If at first he had felt sorry for himself—and of course he had—now he was simply fed up, enraged, and simultaneously on the edge of despair.

  After a third drink, he felt uncommonly sober and lucid, the aim of his thoughts at last properly sighted. The answers he sought about both Johnnie Woods and St. Catherine were of only passing significance, since he could see beyond caring about the exact outcome each answer suggested. What it all reduced down to was this: he wanted their stories; however things turned out, he was their perfect model of an audience, one of the very few who had managed to come up with the price of admission. A high price it was too, but it wasn’t as if he sold his soul. His curiosity seemed promiscuous, but it did not seem puerile. Rather the opposite. He had stopped mining events for their comic opportunities, the absurd charms. He was taking it all very seriously. He was profoundly moved by the performance. It was no longer impossible to be serious. Look, he wanted to shout off the veranda, I am serious.

  Somewhere up there now was a luscious moon—cantaloupe moon, tangerine moon, mango moon, guava moon—and the night had become porous; a bubble of noise rose to its surface and broke, off down the beach. Mitchell checked his wristwatch—it was too early yet to be tempted by Rosehill’s bar. He went to his room, stretched out on the bed to read—a novel about Gettysburg, The Killer Angels; it had won a Pulitzer last year—but his mind wandered. What it really seemed to want to do was skip along through pre-independence per capita production figures for the old estates, a little scientific romp through certainty. Most other nights he would have fallen deliberately into the numbers, and the numbers would have scattered into a colorless landscape of sleep, but he was too restless for that. He set the book aside, thinking it would be a good idea to pack, to save time in the morning. First, books. He couldn’t help it, he always traveled with books, too many, even when it was clear beforehand there’d be scant opportunity to punch through them. He dug his daypack out of the closet and slipped in the Speeches of Che Guevara and a fat treatise by Gramsci. Part homework, part fascination. Agrarian reform was not a new idea, but its newness never seemed to wear off for capitalists, though Mitchell was reluctant to think of himself as such. Successful reform meant building bridges between the shores of two extremes, bridges between ancient habits of greed and insane self-defeating gestures of defiance. He was going to try to read on the beach—that’s what beaches were really for, contemplation—and he was going to swim—his suit and skin-diving gear went into the pack—and eat, somebody would be barbecuing something—his toothpaste and brush—and he was going to sleep with Johnnie—one of Sister Vera’s party-favor condoms was requisitioned for the deed. A fresh tee shirt, a comb—he could take off for the Congo tomorrow, if he wanted. His camera, with half its roll of Tri-X shot last week in the field. Living in a place infiltrated by tourists had dampened whatever amateurish impulses for photography he had once claimed. It was a discreet form of imperialism, picture-taking, but this would be different, he’d be documenting the migratory pattern of friendship. Images that were innately personal.

  The daypack filled, he left it on the counter in the kitchen and, scouting around, as if he had forgotten something, he investigated Johnnie’s market purchases. At least she had gone shopping, as he asked. She had replaced the chicken—he marveled that she had found one to buy—but she had stupidly bought cat kibble too, as if the bush cat that hung around had declared itself ready to settle down into a suburban life. There was a plastic package of hamburger that looked like ground fat with sticky brown blood poured over it. Didn’t Johnnie once write him that she had become a vegetarian, sworn off blood? Garlic bulbs, rice, noodles, bread, lettuce, a can of sardines, eggs—it all struck him as deceptively normal, her day of grocery shopping.

  He wasn’t hungry; there were no dishes in the sink or he would have washed them. She kept house apparently; she wasn’t disinterested in domestic routine and ritual. He went to the bedroom he had given her and, without second thoughts, poked through her things, not hunting for anything specific, but with a sense of getting to know her, this strangely familiar woman, better. He held a pink pair of her underwear and meditated on its crotch, its washed-out stain, faint but absolutely unreadable, nothing but a poor trace of mundane humanity to stare upon. He decided he liked
her clothes, their subdued colors, their implicit rejection of flamboyance. Straight lines, comfort, no use for pretense. No socks or sweaters—she had made herself into an authentic fair-weather girl. No photographs either, no outdated credit cards, no cute mementos, no package of letters fastened with a rubber band, no sentimental trinkets, a teenager’s modest hoard of jewelry and not much more, no nostalgic detritus from a life walked away from, admittedly in haste; nothing to circumvent or deny a message of ordinariness. Variety of girl: ordinary. Well, that was bullshit. She deserved nothing, he argued, that she failed to earn, day by day.

  In one of the pockets of her knapsack, he discovered a small black chamois pouch, which he unzipped; inside was a rosary, its crucifix silver—it mystified him as much as anything about Johnnie ever had. Had she, a lapsed Episcopalian, a woman as theologically oriented as the commodities exchange, converted to Catholicism? Found God? Found a use for God? Bewildered, he replaced the rosary and left the room, as if rebuked: Say what you like but remember she has a soul.

  He shaved haphazardly, nicking himself, eyeing his crooked nose in the bathroom mirror, dabbing the blood with toilet paper. Along the windowsill, a row of Johnnie’s creams and cosmetics and shampoos seemed unnatural, like props. Through the opened window, music whispered to him, emanations of happiness, tugging and prodding. He was wound too tight to stay at home on a Friday night, in a house that had never before felt empty.

  Instead of shortcutting down to the beach, he stayed on the road where it was easier to walk. Up ahead in the darkness, the music came to a stop and he could hear loud drunken voices and laughter. The roadside flowed with pedestrians, many of them singing—their own songs, church hymns, radio tunes, TV jingles, greetings. Good evening, good night, taking a walk, eh? St. Catherine island was a friendly place, he was willing to say, safe as childhood in Nebraska; provincial, ornamented with crimes of passion and crimes of finance but not made ugly and unbearable with malice. Sometimes he even forgot to lock the door to his house; it didn’t strike him as necessary, and the common people were more trustworthy than their leaders.